Laws of Forbidden Marriage in the Temple Scroll and Rabbinic LiteratureLawrence H. Schiffman

This paper investigates the laws of forbidden marriage as found at the end of
the Temple Scroll and in other Qumran texts, and compares them with those of
the Sifra and other rabbinic texts. The fundamental problem faced by these
sources is the existence of multiple lists of forbidden marriages in the Torah,
especially in Leviticus 18 and 20. The two sets of texts take different approaches
based on their overall hermeneutical assumptions. The Temple Scroll constructs one
harmonized, uniform list, whereas the rabbis use the duplicate commands to derive
the prohibitions as well as the liability for punishment for their violation. The
differing approaches each essentially reduce the overlapping lists of the Torah to
one consistent one, although of course they may vary from each other in some of the
details of the specific prohibitions.